


Outskirts of Normal

by Mhalachai



Category: Gilmore Girls, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Same Performer in Different Roles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-04
Updated: 2007-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:09:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2805590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mhalachai/pseuds/Mhalachai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He looks like Dean and tastes like sin and all Lorelai knows is that she's out of her mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outskirts of Normal

**Author's Note:**

> written mid-season of the shows in 2007.

* * *

 

Nothing made any sense. Lorelai had been driving for hours, the feel of the lawyer's pen still burning in her hand. She had no idea where she was, and she didn't care.

Seven months with Christopher, after years of waiting, dancing around the burning bond between them... and it was over, burned out like ashes in the fireplace. The divorce papers had been signed and witnessed, and Lorelai had to escape. She'd driven back to Star's Hollow, stopped the jeep outside Luke's diner, but she couldn't go in there. Another burned bridge. All she seemed to do these days was hurt the people who wanted to care about her. It was all she'd ever done.

She didn't know what she was going to tell Rory.

She'd driven until the gas ran out, until late summer daylight faded around her, and she looked up to find herself in Sugarcreek, Ohio. She'd never been to Ohio. There was a Mill Street and it crossed a Dover Street; she had to turn around and head back to where Dover crossed the railroad tracks to find a gas station that was open on a Tuesday night.

There was a bar across the street, muted with subdued revelry, and suddenly all Lorelai wanted was to be in a place where no one knew her, where no one would talk on the street how poor Lorelai Gilmore had lost yet another man, wasn't it just too bad, and she'd have to smile and pretend it didn't eat her alive, that she didn't _know_ how many chances at love she'd lost because she pushed everyone away.

She still didn't know what to tell Rory.

She parked the jeep in the bar's parking lot, close under a light because she wasn't stupid, and pushed her way through the bar door. Her dark pants and blue sleeveless shirt, not formal enough for a lawyer's office, had left her embarrassed and awkward as she ended her marriage to Christopher, but were now almost too much for this small-town saloon.

The crowd was the usual mix of people in a bar: the drunks, the sports buddies crowded around the small television watching a game, couples young and older, and of course, the obligatory pool game with two twenty-something hunks fondling their cues and flexing for the adoring girls.

And then there was Dean Forrester sitting alone in a corner both.

Lorelai almost walked into a chair when she spotted Dean. What the hell was he doing _here_? She hadn't seen him in a while, but here he was. In the place Lorelai had walked into haphazardly, looking for a little anonymity. It wasn't fair. Her life wasn't fair.

He looked up then, glanced at the pool table before letting his eyes wander across the bar. He saw her, standing inside the door, and stared for a long moment.

Then he looked away.

She wanted to leave, to-- She swallowed the bile in her throat, feeling like she'd been caught by her mother after sneaking out. She wanted to run, and it ate at her. The only thing she had to run from was herself, and after all these years, she should have known that was a lost cause.

So she walked towards Dean. She'd say hello, exchange a few witty comments, then get the hell out of town. Even if she had nowhere to go, she may as well get moving.

"Dean."

He didn't look up.

"Um, Dean? Hello? Earth to Dean?"

Feeling like an idiot, she wanted to ask if he'd gone deaf, but knowing her luck, he'd have been in some horrible industrial accident and would really have gone deaf. He looked up, with a frown like no expression Dean Forester had ever worn. "Dean's over by the pool table," he said slowly. He closed his notebook when Lorelai didn't move. "Is there something I can help you with?"

His voice was all wrong. Slurring his words slightly in that down-south Texan way, buttery and smooth enough to mix her all up inside, he didn't sound like Dean Forrester at all. "Come on, Dean, been taking acting classes?" Lorelai tried to joke, but it fell flat. This man, growing stranger by the moment, stared at her blankly. "That accent..." She closed her mouth, worry gnawing at her stomach. He might look like Dean, but he was a stranger to her. He sat differently, held his pen differently, even had a different confused expression.

This wasn't Dean, and suddenly that was even worse.

"Look, I'm sorry," Lorelai said, stumbling like a fool over her words. "I thought you were someone else, I'll just--" She took a step back and was almost run over by a waitress. "Go."

The stranger stood, his chair moving in a scrape of legs. "No, it's all right." He held out his hand, to placate or soothe, Lorelai wasn't sure. "You just kind of threw me. You thought I was someone named Dean?"

"Yeah, Dean... Forester," Lorelai finished. "Although you might be taller." She frowned up at the young man. "You're six-two?"

"Six-four, actually," he said, a half-embarrassed smile hovering around the corner of his lips. "Six-five if the hair's acting up."

"Which I bet it does," Lorelai said. "Did you say Dean was over at the pool table?"

"Yeah, my... friend, Dean." The man pointed at one of the scruffy guys playing pool. This Dean was cute, but too cocky for his own good. He was talking to a little blonde thing, looking younger than Rory and not nearly as innocent. "Who were you looking for?"

"A Dean who looked like you." Lorelai stared hard at this young man, his clear green eyes wide in the dusky bar light. "With flatter hair."

He smiled at her, a slow quirk of the corner of his lips, and Lorelai was lost. "Well, you'll just have to do with me." He held out his hand, and she found she was taking it in hers. "I'm Sam."

"Sam, hi," Lorelai said, feeling like she was sixteen again and hating it. She was almost forty, she had a daughter in college, and she'd gotten a divorce earlier that day. She wasn't allowed to be sitting in a bar with a clone of her daughter's first boyfriend, feeling her insides melt with the softness of his voice and the touch of his calloused hand. "Lorelai. Is me."

"Lorelai," he repeated, his tongue rolling the vowels around in his mouth like candy. "It's a nice name."

"Thanks," Lorelai said faintly. She became aware that she was still holding onto Sam's hand, and pulled away, self-conscious. All the _bad wrong failure_ of the day, of her life, crashed down on her. She wanted to run, when Sam caught her hand again and held her gently, delicate as spun glass in his fingers.

"Can I buy you a drink?" he asked, and there was a blush creeping its way up his neck. "It's not everyday that I look like someone else."

"Sure," she said, and it wasn't what she wanted to come out of her mouth. "Only if I can buy you a drink for being so, you know. Like someone else."

He may not have a clue as to what she was talking about, but he still smiled at her and gestured her into the booth. As soon as she was seated, he resumed his position in the corner, able to scan the whole room at a glance.

"Memoirs of the road?" Lorelai asked, pointing at the book. Her left ring finger was bare, and not seeing Christopher's ring there surprised her for a moment.

"Something like that," Sam said, tucking the book into his bag. "I'm on a trip with my friend."

"Doing the Kerouac thing?"

Sam let out a short, barking laugh. The expression on his face carved about ten years off him, twisting in Lorelai's chest. "Less Kerouac, more Scooby Do some days." His gaze traveled down her body in the span of a heartbeat. "What about you?"

Lorelai clenched her hands together, wishing the feel of that damned pen would go away. "Just driving east," she said.

"East," Sam repeated. He looked again at her fancy lawyer's office shirt, at the ten-dollar watch from the Hartford mall booth, and she wondered what he saw. If he knew what she was. A failure, the bad daughter, a mother whose daughter hardly ever called anymore.

Everything crowded in again, and she turned to signal the waitress so she wouldn't scream. "He'd like a drink," Lorelai said to the bored waitress. She wanted to be quippy, to claw back at the words she used to keep the world at bay, but all she had was a set of keys, two hundred cash in twenties burning a hole in her pocket, and a credit card on its last legs. "And so would I."

"I'll have a beer," Sam said, never taking his eyes off her.

"Bring a pitcher," Lorelai instructed. "And what's the girliest drink you have?"

"Margarita," the waitress said. Lorelai saw the judgment in her face, labeling her as a cougar for sitting with this young man with his jean jacket and unlined face. "The bartender can even do salt on the glass if you want."

"Bring it on," Lorelai said, sitting back in the booth. She didn't want to be here, but she had nothing to go back to. No more Christopher, no more Luke, no one in Star's Hollow to miss her. Rory was at school, living her life like she was supposed to, leaving Lorelai alone. Like she was supposed to be.

"You look like you need someone to talk to," Sam said, his voice low in the chaos of the bar.

Lorelai focused on him, his eager face hiding something. He wanted to know something, something more than he'd asked. "It's just been a long day," Lorelai tried to explain. He took her words without comment, staring at her intently. "What?" she said after a few minutes.

He cocked his head to the side, a stray wisp of bangs falling in his eyes. "I'm trying to figure you out," he said as the waitress came back with two pitchers of alcoholic oblivion. "I thought you'd be trying to get to know me."

Lorelai shrugged as she flipped her hair over her shoulder, and she didn't miss how Sam's eyes followed the baring of her throat. "I know this much," she said, following the movement of Sam's hands as he poured her a margarita. "You're a lumberjack on the road, looking for the elusive Maltese Fulcrum."

He set the glass down with a laugh, sloshing margarita juice over his hand. "Am I?" he asked with a smile, sucking the sour drink from his fingers. Luckily, he kept talking, giving Lorelai enough time to remember how to breathe. "And you're an international jewel thief, hiding in small-town America while you find a way to fence the Russian crown jewels?"

Lorelai hid a smirk behind her glass. "And you will never know 'ow I did eet," she said in the worst Russian accent known to man.

Sam lifted his glass to hers. "Here's to the future."

Funnily, to her ears, he didn't sound any happier about the toast than she did.

* * *

"I signed my divorce papers today," Lorelai blurted out as she drained the last of the margarita pitcher into her glass.

"Really?" Sam held up his hand for the waitress. "I'm sorry."

"I'm not," Lorelai said. She frowned at her melting drink. "I'm not. He was..." She knocked back her glass. "He was him, and I was me, and it never works, not with me."

Sam nodded as sagely as a pitcher of beer would let him. "The reason for my failed relationship was me, too," he told her.

Lorelai leaned over the table, propping herself up with an arm. "What's your story?" she asked, pushing her empty glass aside. "You've been more tight-lipped than Woodward and Bernstein."

To her utter surprise, Sam reached across the table and traced his finger over her lower lip. "Why do you think I have a story?" he asked, pulling his hand back.

Lorelai's heart pounded in her throat. "Everyone's got a story," she said. "Sometimes it's TV Guide, others it's Moby Dick."

The alcohol swimming in her bloodstream was making it hard to think clearly. That may have been the reason she let Sam take his hand in hers. "Maybe," he confessed as he ran his thumb over her palm. Dean Forrester had never looked so lost, and the sort of comfort Lorelai wanted to give to Sam had nothing to do with maternal instincts. "It's just... me and Dean, we had this goal, you know, to accomplish, an end in sight."

"And?" Lorelai asked softly. She turned her hand in Sam's and twined her fingers with his. "Did you do it?"

"Yeah." Sam closed his eyes. "Yeah, we did it. And now, it's like... What now?" He didn't take his hand from Lorelai's. "I thought, that after we were done, there'd be an end to... this."

Lorelai traced her thumb over Sam's palm, wondering how someone could be so young and so old at the same time. "It never ends, it just... is."

She felt stupid saying it, but looking at Sam, she realized that it was just what he needed to hear.

* * *

She was too damned drunk to drive, and too drunk to object to Sam helping her book a room at the motel across the way from the bar. The man behind the desk leered at her in such an ugly way that she might have worried, if she didn't have Sam standing at her side, his hand possessive on her waist.

She wasn't supposed to be this kind of woman, the one to got a motel room with a man she didn't know, with the man who was literally half her age and could break her in two if he wanted to.

But from the way his hands curved around her hip, she knew he wouldn't hurt her. She'd been wrong in the past, but she knew this was right.

And so _wrong_. She tried to explain, tried to tear herself way from his mouth, from hot, hungry kisses that ate at her lips and her neck, going lower as they neared the bed. She tried to fight her way out of the mess her emotions played with her, to explain this was just a rebound, that the _oh so wrong_ of this made her cringe, that she had a daughter his age and they used to have movie nights with a man who looked too much like Sam, and that alone was enough reason for him to run away from her.

But Sam stole the unspoken words from her lips with kisses that were so sweet, so overwhelming that Lorelai stopped talking, stopped thinking, stopped everything but surrendering to his hands and his lips and his body on hers, between her thighs, taking her away and making her real.

* * *

"Stay."

He hadn't moved, curled up around her body like it was the only shelter in a storm. Still, she had to ask. "I'm not going anywhere," he lied, his voice a whisper against her neck.

Lorelai stared at the wall. Maybe it was the aches in her body, after the hours of almost desperate sex. No one had ever touched her with such naked need in his eyes, not Christopher, not Luke, no one.

She wanted to ask Sam to come with her, and she knew it was a lost cause. "Just for tonight," she said weakly. His arm was solid over her chest, his body a protective line against her back. She didn't know him but she never wanted to let him go.

His lips touched her neck, and in spite of the aches, of her exhaustion, she turned in his arms. "Just for tonight," he whispered before pushing her back onto the bed.

This wasn't real, she knew. There were so many things that she hadn't told him, and she'd be lying to herself if she pretended that she knew anything about him.

Sam's lips traced a line down her throat, then lower, making her forget what she was worried about. This wasn't forever; this wasn't even for more than a few hours. It would be best if she took what she could from him, then forgot this young man in the morning.

Only, as she buried her fingers in his hair, her back arching up off the cheap motel mattress, she knew deep down that she'd never be able to forget Sam.

_the end_


End file.
